2 SOCIALIST APPEAL SEPTEMBER 28, 1940 SOCIALIST APPE AL VOL. IV. No 39 Saturday, September 28, 1940 Published Weekly by the SOCIALIST APPEAL PUBLISHING ASSN.
at 116 University Place, New York, Telephone: Algonquin 8547 The Crisis In Soviet Agriculture Japanese Move To Checkmate Anglo US Deal Editorial Board: FELIX MORROW ALBERT GOLDMAN General Manager: RUTH JEFFREY Reveal Once More Character of Regime Stalin Latest Decrees Agains Peasants Subscriptions: 32. 00 per year: 00 for six months.
Foreign. 38. 00 per year, 1, 60 for six months. Bundle orders: cents per copy in the United States: cents per copy in all foreign countries. Single coples: conta 19 Reentered second class matter December Act of Marcosofice at New York, under the 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.
Number to Be Purged Is Raised by Izvestia In his report to the Tenth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Trade Unions as reported by PRAVDA, Shvernik had announced that 108, 000 paid functionaries would be dropped from the rolls. As we explained in last week APPEAL, this means ousting a majority of the union functionaries. This figure it now turns out is a typographical error, the actual number involved is 128, 000. The Commission of the CCTU which is investigating the personnel of the trade unions has found it necessary to cut the apparatus by dropping 128, 000 people. IZVESTIA, July 30)
In the same issue IZVESTIA declares. It should be pointed out that the reduction of the paid workers in the trade union organizations is not taking place without resistance. Could this perhaps be a subtle hint to Comrade Shvernik and his confreres?
forces an end to strikes or prevents the strikes from taking place, and shoves rotten settlements down the throats of unwilling workers. The Stalinists then go on to draw a contrast between Hillman behavior and Lewis. The most cursory examination of the picture of Lewis concocted by the Stalinists demonstrates, however, that it is a sheer fraud.
Hillman drove the aluminum workers into a rotten settlement? True. But Lewis was in on it.
Hillman is trying to throttle the militancy of the auto workers? True. But Lewis has at least as much, and in fact more to say, in the Auto Workers Union, than Hillman; and Lewis is telling the auto workers exactly the same thing that Hillman is telling them. That is precisely why the Stalinist Daily Worker (and of course the Stalinists in the locals involved) has been quiet as a mouse while the Auto Union leadership (a combination of Hillman and Lewis forces) has been crushing the militancy of the Detroit and Flint auto workers.
In a word: show us one union situation in which Lewis has been advocating a class struggle program as against the class collaboration program of Hillman. You can show it because it doesn exist. militant wing in the CIO today would be conducting an irreconcilable struggle against the Roosevelt administration throttling of the unions.
And this struggle would naturally be directed against Roosevelt agents, such as Hillman. Such a struggle would, however, not necessitate any split in the CIO.
But Lewis is not conducting such a struggle. On the contrary, the difference between his policy and that of Hillman is not discernible to the naked eye.
At most, it could be said that the Lewis faction thinks Hillman is selling ten cents too cheaply.
Under these conditions, therefore, it is a crime against the labor movement for these two unprincipled factions to be driving toward a split of the CIO The Stalinists have, of course, very special reasons for pushing Lewis toward split. They have no intention of letting go of the protective covering offered them by Lewis; no matter how identical is the policy of Lewis with that of Hillman, they will continue to praise and fawn upon Lewis.
For they know that without his protection they time, however, in order to keep their following, the Stalinists require the fiction that Lewis is more progressive than what Hillman represents. Since that fiction cannot be bolstered by evidence of a progressive policy actually practiced by Lewis, the Stalinists are trying to clothe that fiction by the evidence of an organizational split between Hillman and Lewis.
In this criminal venture they are immeasurably aided by the presence in Lewis inner circle of Stalinists like Lee Pressman and Len de Caux, who have made a fine art of flattering Lewis and giving him to understand that he is the Messiah of American Labor.
This is the ugly situation in the CIO today.
Every CIO militant must understand it. Then he must fight it. The CIO membership must tell Hillman and Lewis: We will not tolerate a split in the CIO!
The fundamental cure must go further. Every militant must fight for a militant program of defense of the workers interests against the bosses and against the government strangling of militancy. Once the unions go into action on behalf of the workers, neither Hillman nor Lewis nor the Stalinists will have the power to split the workers ranks.
It was revealed in Washington last week that tricornered parleys were underway among Britain, Australia, and the United States concerning their common interests in the Pacific. At the same time it was announced that the cruiser Augusta, flagship of the Asiatic fleet, would put in at Singapore for repairs instead of using the nearer by facili ties in the Philippines.
It didn take the Japanese very long to put this two and two together. The and Britain were evidently working together at a much faster pace than the Japanese had anticipated. The brief pause in Japan squeeze on Indochina came abruptly to an end. Tokyo decided to move in before Anglo American cooperation could become effective in Far Eastern waters. Early on Sept. 23 Japanese troops moved into Indochina to carry out the agreement which had been accepted the previous day by the French.
The exact terms of the agreement have not yet been made public. According to the French govern ment at Vichy the Japanese were given the right to use three Indochina air bases and to move in 6, 000 soldiers to police them. Actually the terms are meaningless. What is happening in effect is that the Japanese are moving in on Indochina, taking over the Far Eastern holdings of the punctured French empire.
The status quo in the Pacific which the and Japan agreed to respect last Spring is again being jogged out of shape.
To the Japanese Indochina constitutes a base for operations against southwest China. It places the Burma Road within relatively easy reach of Japanese bombers. But more than this, it brings the outstretched hand of Japanese imperialism a thousand miles closer to India the Dutch East Indies and provides a third side to the Japanese encirclement of the Philippines.
The Workers Will Not would be cut to pieces in the unions. At the same BATTLE OF BRITAIN WILL DECIDE In Washington Secretary of State Hull repeated for the record its disapproval of the upsetting of the status quo, as the New York Times reported on Sept. 24. The State Department also went out of its way to deny the allegation in Vichy that the French had appealed to the and had been told that concessions would have to be made to the Japanese in the given circumstances.
What Hull had apparently told the French ambassador was that the could not move to checkmate Japan at the present time. This is still largely the case, except that the embargo on war materials to Japan is likely to be stiffened and pressure put on the British to re open the Burma Road next month The route was closed in July at Japanese insistence.
But American disapproval. as the Times put it, is still for the record. The Battle of Britath must decide what action the United States fleet will take in the Pacific. And the Battle of Britain is not yet over.
The move into Indochina marks the triumph of the group in Tokyo which has favored a southern orientation instead of a northern orientation. Maritime Siberia, which has been one of the fixed objectives of Japanese expansionist policy for more than 20 years, is left for the time being to future actions.
Right now Japan is concentrating on the twin task of swallowing the holdings of the already defeated em.
pires the French and the Dutchmand in driving the British out of their Far Eastern footholds.
hozes to reduce the plans for sowing grain, oll seed, potatoes, resulting in a reduction of areas sown for these crops.
Prefer Working for Themselves Translated into human language this bureaucratic formula means that peasants find it far more profitable to tend their own land strips, and that they prefer to sow and harvest those crops which bring highest prices in the market.
Pravda devotes its entire editorial on June 16 to stressing the need of rigid discipline in the collective farms. The kolkhoz members, admits Pravda, are spending only the bare minimum on work in the collectives while devoting their main energies to their own enterprises.
Leading party members in Orel are singled out for attack. While themselves members of the kolkhoz, these party members are spending all their time on thelr own land strips. Pravda, June 17. The Peasants Are Resisting The peasants are resisting by either delaying state deliveries or refusing to make them alto gether. The favorite pretext is lack of transport.
While awaiting the trucks to come and gather the grain due to the state, the peasants are using their horse and ox drawn vehicles to carry their own produce to the open market.
The columns of the official press are filled with alarm signals which are strikingly reminiscent of the kulak grain strike of 1928 1929.
In the Kuubishey district no deliveries were made in July (Pravda, August Report from Voronezh: Delay in harvesting crops causing enormous losses. Many kolkhozniks systematical.
ly refrain from coming to work, they prefer to.
take trips to the market (Pravda, August Report from the Starominsk district: Grain is rotting in the fields (Pravda, August. Liter.
ally by the hundred the reports are coming in, monotonously the same: no deliverles. arrears in deliveries. crops rotting in the field.
collective farmers busy with their own affairs.
Stalin Latest Decree On August 7, Pravda prints a special resolution on state deliveries, signed by Stalin, in the name of the Central Committee of the Party, and by Molotov, in the name of the Council of People Commissars.
The decree begins with the warning that it is impermissible for the Party, the Soviet and the Agricultural organs to repeat last year mistakes when the harvest was excessively delayed which led to large losses in crops in a number of Republics, Regions and Provinces owing to the neg.
ligent attitude of the leaders of the total organizations. The beginning of the grain harvest shows that these mistakes are again being repeated in a whole series of regions. Our emphasis. This preamble is followed by the statement that state deliveries are lagging behind or are not being made at all. Especially singled out are the Provinces of Omsk, Chelyabinsk and Kuubishev, the District of Krasnoyarak and the Auto nomous Republic of Bashkira where many leading party and Soviet workers proved to be cap tives of the anti state tendencies of isolated kolkhozes and kolkhozniki, and as a consequence of this, the plan of grain deliveries was not fulfilled and serious arrears have accumulated in the obligatory deliveries of grain.
In the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union accredited to none other than Stalin himself, it is stated: The collective farm peasantry, as the Sixteenth Party Congress stated in one of its resolutions, had become a real and Arm mainstay of the Soviet Powert. 312. Expressed here is Stalin most cherished hope that his regime could be stabilized by the prosperous collectives. Now another of Stalin world publicized boasts has been exploded.
We have not long to wait before news comes of purges of the party, Soviet and Administrative organs in the rural areas, together with another drive against the anti state elements in the collectivos. Pravda for August already carries accounts of the first trials of the administrative personnel of the kolkhozes.
The rumblings of the kulak danger are about to break into a storm that must exceed in its fury the ravages of the previous struggle against the peasantry.
a The split in the New York state convention of the CIO, which took place last weekend at Rochester, is an alarm signal to the rank and file of the CIO workers everywhere. What happened in Rochester is a deadly threat to the unity of the CIO as a whole; and the criminall sponsibl behavior of the contending factions make it clear that both the Hillman faction and the LewisStalinist faction must be called to order by the CIO membership First of all, we can dismiss with contempt the various pretexts offered by both factions to justify the state convention split. Both groups attempted to pack the convention and both were prepared in advance to split unless they controlled the convention. Nothing would be illuminated by an examination of the legalistic arguments offered by either faction to explain its shameful behavior.
Let us get down to fundamentals on the situation in the CIO. Is there any justification whatever for a split in the CIO? For that is what is involved, a national split. For if this clash of cliques goes on, it will lead to a split throughout the Cio. Is there any justification for it?
We are not mealy mouthed preachers of unity the labor movement at all times and under all conditions. On the contrary, we supported the CIO a the CIO all the way to the formation of an independent organization outside the AFL. Because the issue at stake made irrelevant all questions about who was to blame for this or that move. The issue involved was whether or not the basic industries, the mass production industries which could not be organized under the AFL craft union forms, were to be organized.
Whenever such a fundamental issue shall be involved in a conflict within the trade unions, we are prepared to support the progressive wing in whatever steps are necessary to succeed. It is, as a matter of fact, seldom that such a conflict requires an organizational split in the trade union movement.
The conflict within the CIO today, however, is in no way analogous with the conflict within the AFL out of which the CIO arose. There is nothing fundamental in the conflict between Hillman on the one side and John Lewis and the Stalinists on the other.
That was demonstrated by the Rochester scandal last week. Neither side issued a clear cut statement of principle issues at stake. All statements were down on the low level of blaming each other for trying to pack the convention, and those statements did not include a single statement about any other principle except the principle of who was to control the convention. Had either side held a well clarified principled position in opposition to the other, we can be sure that its statements would have centered around that principled position and not around the secondary details of convention rules and procedure Just remember how effectively John Lewis enunciated the principled position of the CIO forces in 1936 and 1937 against the AFL bureaucrats. But today he cannot distinguish himself from Hillman, nor can the Stalinists do that for him, despite their unquestioned ability to cut anything they want out of whole cloth.
For to get down to cases. the fight between Hillman and Lewis is nothing but a clique fight.
Hillman is undoubtedly trying to push Lewis out of the leadership of the CIO; Lewis is retaliating in kind. But principled issues? Where are they? The Stalinists try to invent some. They picture Hillman as a sell out artist who at Roosevelt bidding against the AFL top bureaucrats; we supported Equality In Wartime?
By JOHN WRIGHT (This is the third in a series of articles on the present crisis in the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Third Five Year Plan in industry is accompanied by equally grave developments on the agricultural front.
In June, 1934, Comrade Trotsky predicted that war time conditions in the Soviet Union under Stalin would lead to the following consequences in agriculture. Under the influence of the critical need of the state for articles of prime necessity, the individualistic tendencies of the peasant economy will receive a considerable reinforcement, and the centrifugal forces within the KOLKHOZES (the collective farms) will increase with every month of war. War and the Fourth International. Reality has verified this prediction. Under war time conditions that have existed in the USSR since the signing of the Stalin Hitler pact the individualistic tendencies have been growing by leaps and bounds.
There was a forced growth of these tendencies even prior to the outbreak of war. The text of the new income laws issued on April 9, 1940 contains the following, declaration: The fiscal income of handicraft workers. has increased from 557 billion roubles to 138 billion roubles in 1938, that is, it doubled in four years. Handicraft work is of course outside the collectives.
But the functioning of the collectives was not seriously impaired during this period.
The very first year of war time conditions, however, found the peasants reducing the Spring sowing, delaying deliveries to the state, concentrating more and more on the cultivation of their own land strips, engaging more extensively in selling in the open market.
And now in 1940, despite the most rigid censorship, it is apparent that the individualistic tendencies within the collectives have grown to the point of endangering the very existence of the collectives.
This year Spring sowing has been the worst on record since the terrible period of forced collectivization. The collective farmers are refusing to fulfill plan quotas, Mr. Gedye, the Moscow correspondent of the Times, enumerates from Bulgaria the following items, which he had gathered from the official Stalinist press, and which the Moscow censors refused to pass. IZVESTIA editorial on had state of Spring sowing Reference to IZVESTIA editorial saying IZVESTIA once again calls attention to bad Spring sowing. Soviet press statement, No single republic fulfilled the potato plan last year. Official report showing cotton sowing decreased by nearly 30 per cent since last year. Figures for price increases of necessities, varying from 25 to 150 per cent. Times, Sept. 14. Revealing as these newspaper editorials, comments, figures, etc. are, the administrative and repressive measures adopted to cope with the situation serve to disclose even more graphically the critical condition of agriculture.
Applying the Lash to the Peasants New laws are now in effect governing deliveries of staple crops to the state. Hitherto these deliveries were based on a fixed proportion of the acreage nown and harvested.
On April 1, a kase was issued fixing a new standard, independent of the actual crop out based on the total number of acres at the disposal of the collective farms.
The purpose of this emergency decree is twofold. Stalin hopes thereby to compel the collectives to carry out the sowing plans. But a more immediate goal is pursued. Through this administrative measure, the regime seeks to obtain from the kolkhozes a greater share of the sharply reduced 1940 crop, which has fallen so far below the plan that state deliveries on the old basis would be catastrophically short of the needs of the cities for the coming winter, and would mean the depletion of accumulated reserve stocks.
Here, then. we have the first stage of a thinly disguised return to forced collections.
Several other decrees followed. On April 11, uhase ordered obligatory deliveries of grain and rice. on April 16 came another ordering obligatory deliveries of potatoes.
In the text of tne April 6th ukase it is suddenly proclaimed that the old policy of the regime fostered an urge on the part of the kolleRUSSIA FATE IN ABEYANCE Like the Germans, the Japanese are holding the Russion question in abeyance. Like the Germans, they count on dealing with the Soviet Union later on.
Like the Germans, they count themselves safe from Soviet attack. Like the Germans, they figure that the wealth of all the Russias will be easy pickings once the Western powers are defeated. Right now they have much more to fear from an Anglo American combination to counter their moves.
The effectiveness of this combination is dependent upon continued successful British resistance to the German assault. The military naval aspects of the combine would be vested largely in the United States fleet. In London there is already open talk of placing at the Navy disposal, British base facilities not only at Singapore, but at Sidney, Austrialis, and along the West African coast for future operations in the Indian Ocean. This would seem to suggest that American participation in the war would take the form of an American Japanese clash while Britain carried on the fight against Germany and Italy in Europe and the Mediterranean. group of men and women recently entered the swank Hotel Savoy in London, went down into the hotel swank subterranean restaurant and air raid shelter and demanded they be allowed to remain during an alarm.
Nor is this all. It now comes out that the poor of London were even being kept out of the deep subway stations and with many of them unable to find room in the public shelters, while nobby hotels and night clubs were offering those who could pay) a snappy combination of drinks and food, entertainment, comfortable beds and whatnot in bombproof shelters from which, of course, the poor were excluded.
Protesting delegations have secured from the British government a promise that shelters, whether publicly or privately owned, will henceforth be available to all, rich and poor alike. The government could scarcely avoid making this promise.
However, we are ready to predict that the promise will not be carried out. capitalist government cannot possibly create equality between rich and poor in any sphere.
It appears that the Communist Party of Britain played a role in raising this demand for equality in the shelters. The British Labor Party leaders denounce the Stalinists for making political capital out of the misery of the people. We are quite ready to agree that the Stalinists are utilizing this as a means to get out from under the universal hatred which the British masses feel against these puppets of Stalin.
But why did not the British Labor Party leaders take the lead in defending the interests of the people? For a very simple reason. They are in the government; they therefore will do nothing to embarrass their capitalist partners in the government, And their capitalist partners did not want to deal with this problem.
The important point to keep in mind is this: far from defending the workers interests by participating in a capitalist government, the labor lackeys of capitalist governments serve to thwart the will of the workers. Britain is not an isolated example of this. Just look at the role which Sidney Hillman, Dan Tracy, Dan Tobin and their kind are playing in the Roosevelt administration.
Soviet Workers Resisting Stalin Anti Labor Laws That Soviet workers are striking and in other ways resisting Stalin anti labor legislation was revealed officially by PRAVDA itself in a leading editorial which stated. CERTAIN FLOATERS AND DAWDL.
ERS ARE INVENTING ALL SORTS OF LOOPHOLES WHEREBY TO EVADE THE LAW. SOME ARE CUNNINGLY PROVIDING THEMSELVES WITH SWINDLE NOTES FROM THE POLY.
CLINICS, OTHERS ARE LOAFING AND IDLING AWAY THEIR TIME DURING WORK HOURS. PRAVDA, August Never before has Stalin official press allowed itself any reference, no matter how veiled, to strikes on the job or other forms of mass resistance on the part of the work.
ers. If it does so now in so thinly disguised form, then it must mean that a mass scale resistance is involved, and that the apparatus of repression must be lashed into action to overcome it. IS BRITAIN HEIR In other words, Britain would in effect be ceding to the its place in the East. It would all be couched in gentlemanly terms, to be sure, but it would amount in effect to a dominated deal through which Wall Street expects to plant its flag and its dollars on the farthest Pacific bastions. The British might think it chestnut pulling in their behalf, but if the base destroyer deal is any criterion, it is fairly clear that the American imperialists will extract 100 cents on the dollar this time.
Thus the changes already so swiftly made in Europe are beginning in Asia. The empires established by the British, French, and Dutch by blood and iron conquests, are being cut into new patterns. France filched Indochina from the Chinese after two bloody, one sided wars, in 1866 and 1885. They ruled it, directly and through puppets, with whip and sword. They bled it for nearly 80 years. Now their God given rights to Indochina are being usurped by new conquerors. The British acquired their predominance in China by mercilessly beating the helpless Manchu Dynasty to its knees. Now they are on the downslide, being roughly pushed by their Japanese enemies and gently shoved by their American friends.
We are on the eve of a new drawing of the Pacific map, with the impending changes vastly more sweeping than those made by the plundering powers in China around 1900 or by the victors in the First World War at Versailles. The conflict for the new mastery lies between Japanese and imperialism,