SOCIALIST APPEAL NOVEMBER 30, 1940 SOCIALIST APPEAL Child Labor in USSR Go Forward VOL. IV No. 18 Saturday, November, 30 1940 PubMehed Weekly by the SOCIALIST APPSAL PUBLISHING ASSN.
at 116 University Place, New York, Telephone: Algonquin 3547 Editorial Board: FELIX MORROW ALBERT GOLDMAN General Manager: RUTH JEFFREY Subscriptions: 00 per year: 00 for six months Foreign. 00 per year. 50 for alx months. Bundle orders: cents per copy in the United States; cents per copy in all foreign countries. Single coples: cents. Reentered second class matter December Hotel Hotels New York, under the FIGHT WITH THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY ON THE WAR FRONT: For: Military training of workers, financed by gov.
ernment, under control of the trade unions. The establishment of special officers training camps, financed by the government and controlled by the trade unions, to train workers to become officers. Confiscation of all war profits all company books to be open for trade union inspection. Expropriation of all war industries and other operation under workers control. Trade union wages for all workers drafted into the ported they saw the silhouette of American warships in the distance and recognized among them the destroyer Plunkett.
The Mexican press was almost unanimous in the belief that the warships were American.
Lieutenant Zavala, commander of the Mexican gunboat, Queretaro, who warned one foreign warship out of Mexican territorial waters, is reported as chief authority for the belief that at least one American destroyer entered Mexican waters.
Later in the day of November 18, three United States destroyers crusing close to Tampico where the German boat was scuttled detained and examined the papers of two neutral ships, one the Honduran freighter Ceiba, the other the Mexican tanker, Cerro Azul. This occurred within the mile limit off the Mexican shore. The American destroyers were reported to be the Plunkett, the Broome and the Gilmer.
The Navy Department denied officially that Naval vessels stopped any merchantmen near Tampico. At the same time Under Secretary of State Welles declared that the American destroyers alleged to have turned back the four German Ships had not entered Mexican territorial waters.
In view of the fact that Welles remained silent as to the identity of the warships which did drive back the German ships, his statem can be taken as merely a diplomatic evasion of the question.
The Mexican government on November 22 issued a declaration which was pointedly silent as to whether American destroyers had violated Mexican territorial waters, but added significantly: The German craft attempted to leave Tampico with duly cleared papers: American destroyers, after they were some hours at sea played searchlights on them.
It can thus be taken as officially established that it was American war ships which turned back the German freighters and which violated Mexican territorial waters.
It has become a commonplace that modern wars commence without a formal declaration of war. Incidents such as this one in Mexican waters simply increase in number until the nations become involved in major military operations. Determining the aggressor in the conflict is simply a legal question that not even the bourgeois jurists themselves can settle upon.
What is important in this incident is its clear proof that the Administration in Washington is cold bloodedly and deliberately taking this nation step by step into the second world war. Aid to Britain short of war becomes increasingly vague as Roosevelt under this formula prepares to march American soldiers onto the battlefield to die for Wall Street army. Full equality for Negroes in the armed forces Down with Jim Crowism. An end to secret diplomacy. peoples referendum on any and all wars.
AT HOME: For: job and decent living for every worker. Thirty thirty 30 weekly minimum wage 30 hour weekly maximum for all workers on all jobs. 30 weekly old age and disability pension. Full social, political and economic equality for the Negro people. Workers Defense Guards against vigilante and fascist attacks. twenty billion dollar Federal public works and housing program to provide jobs for the unemployed. Expropriate the Sixty Families.
Latin American Workers Face Imperialism By JOSEPH HANSEN Vice President Wallace, the press informs us, has been studying Spanish the past few years. His interest in this language is not strictly cultural. He is learning Spanish the better to represent the interests of American imperialism in the coming period. For the expansive force of imperialism follows geographic lines and the first area of conquest for imperiall ism is Latin America.
Wallace has already been detailed to represent Washington at the inauguration of President Elect Camacho in Mexico City on December Almazan, who pretended to be the legally elected president of Mexico has thus been discarded by Washington after being held on the shelf since last July pending conversations with the representatives of the Mexican bourgeoisie over the oil expropriations, naval and air bases, and the construction of military highways connecting with the great military highways in the United States.
The Junket of Wallace to Mexico City is thus part of the drive of imperialism south of the Rio Grande.
In Brazil, the controlled press applauded the idea of mutual friendship visits such as that of Wallace to Mexico.
For despots such as Vargas in Brazil and through out South America it is largely a question of the price that can be obtained through conceding to one or another of the imperialist powers. And this price is expressed in the form of loans after good neighbor visits to Washington. commission from Argentina, for example, is holding out for a 250, 000, 000 loan before cementing a friendship with the imperialism which would include construction of naval and air bases on the Rio Plata. Of the South American nations Argentina has up to date carried on the most indepen dent policy in relation to the United States. This was due to the fact that her exports, grain, beef, hides, etc. were barred from this country by high tariffs and went to Europe, principally to England.
The commission which is dreaming of the 250, 000. 000 loan is also asking the Washington administration to make possible the export of agricultural products from Argentina to the United States. But this can only be done at the expense of the agricultural areas. And the switch in the farm vote in the recent election into the Republican camp has already given warning to Roosevelt that the farmers are in no mood to brook increased competition in a market already glutted with agricultural products.
The Roosevelt Administration which could find na solution to over production save curtailing and des troying crops here at home, will find it scarcely pos, sible to grant the Argentine request that the customs let down the barriers to her surpluses.
THE CASE OF MARTINIQUE Already Washington has obtained eight new milltary bases from Great Britain along the Atlantic coast from New Foundland to Trinidad.
The use to which Roosevelt intends to put these bases are shown clearly in the case of Martinique, French possession in the Carribean.
Operating from the newly acquired base of St.
Lucia, warships are patrolling the vicinity of Martinique, enabling British warships to withdraw for service in the North Atlantic. But the island of Martinique possesses one of the finest harbors in the Carribean, and on top of this there are 110 American bombers on the Island which were sold to the French government before the capitulation to Hitler.
Washington wants these bombers, the harbor, and in fact the entire island, and the neighboring one of Guadeloupe.
Already the capitalist press is laying down the appropriate barrage of propaganda preparatory to direct military action. The New York Times began the campaign with queries about these 110 airplanes gathering rust in the Carribean. But the New York Post has been the most blatant. In an editorial in the November 14 issue it demands: Why is it important for the free nations of the Western Hemisphere to wrest control of the islands of Martinique and Guades loupe from Fra at once? then fter an argument as to the desirability of Martinique coming under domination, the Post declares: Our interests command action at once.
As if this language were not strong and plain enough, the Post editorial referred to what purports to be an inside story on conditions on Martinique published the previous day. The story deseribes the influx of Nazi agents who presumably were sent to agitate the native population against the United States. It speaks of military preparations for defense of Martinique, the possibility of Martinique being used as a base for German invasion of the Western Hemisphere.
The people are starving to death, the article reports which is probably true as all the Latin Ame.
rican peoples suffer in frightful poverty, although without commiseration from the capitalist press un til it is deemed feasible to seize them from a rival An Independent Labor Party based on the Trade Ominous Warning Unions. Workers and Farmers Government.
Stalin Issues Decree Driving Soviet Children From School In order to Create Larger Labor Reserve; Decree Retroactive By JOHN WRIGHT tions, the Council of People ing class pressure in advanced By ukase of October 2, Soviet Commissars of the USSR finds countries, to legislating child lachildren 14 years of age and over it necessary to place a share of bor out of the basic industry. One are immediately subject to draft the educational expenditures in is almost embarrased to repeat into a conscript labor force: the secondary schools and univer this elementary fact. Yet Stalin right to education go solemnly sities in the USSR upon the not only reintroduces on the ve guaranteed by the Stalin Consti toilers themselves, and has in ry eve of the Twenty third An tution, has been abolished, without this connection decided. to niversary of October this bestial a formal constitutional amend introduce the above listed tui relic of barbarism but envisages ment, or consultation of the Su tions. PRAVDA, October it as the only available reservoir preme Council of the USSR. The of labor power for Soviet indusTo believe the Kremlin, the toil doors of secondary schools and try. The irreconcilable conflict universities have been slammed ers are now so well off that their between the further rule of the Shut in the faces of the Soviet Children need no longer go to bureaucracy and the further ecoschool.
youth.
homic, cultural and social advanRETROACTIVE LAW REAL MOTIVE cement of the Soviet masses die The retroactive law passed by The real motive for the cultural tates the logic of Moloch Stalin People Commissars introduces expropriation of the youth lies in decrees. payment for instruction, from the child labor decrees promut WINDOW DRESSING September 1, 1950, in the eighth rated on the same day. The Prav But will not the children first ninth and tenth grades of second ca, in an editorial hailing these go to trade schools. Doesn the ary schools, and in universities. historie decrees of October law provide for 2 years training (Pravda, October 3, 1940. Our incidentally, no comment has yet at government expense. Won emphasis)
appeared in any Sovlet paper on they serve only as apprentices?
In Moscow, Leningrad and ca the equally historic abrogation All this is window. dressing, for pital ties of the Soviet Republics, or free education declares oponly the consumptio of gullible the tuition in secondary schools that child labor was made neces faithful abroad, and the venal is set at 200 roubles a year. In sary by the scarcity of labor apologists of the The de all other cities and villages. 150 which, in turn, was primarily due crees provide that the Council of roubles a year. Tuition in unito the refusal of peasants to leave People Commissars, through a the land.
versities is 100 roubles a year in specially appointed board, has sole Moscow, Leningrad and capita. In pre revolutionary Rus.
and complete jurisdiction over the cities of the Soviet Federation; sian villages. millions of disposal of the labor reserve.
300 roubles in other cities (where poor peasants would leave each This ominous clause invalidates universities are few and far be: year to hire themselves out in in and of itself any and all other tween. Art schools fine arts, cities. In the USSR. the provisions, assuming of course drama, music and other highest collective farmers lead a secure that the gang in the Kremlin feels paid professions 500 roubles. life. But for this very reason itself in any way bound by the State subsidies to university stu the old sources which assured scraps of paper it labels lawa.
dents have been withdrawn, ex a spontaneous influx of labor There are no facilities for houscept for the best students. The forces into industry have been ing let alone training. I! any rest, and this means approxima. shut off, have disappeared. further verification of the real tely 98 per cent, will have to sup. PRAVDA, October aims of these deerees is required, port themselves. The supply of we cite the date set for the inSoviet scientists, engineers, tech PREFERRED THE LAND duction of child labor into basic nicians, already meager, is thus During the first two Five Year industries coal mines, ferrous further reduced at the very Tlans more than 15 million peas and non ferrous mines, iron and source. Even in secondary schools ants swarmed into the cities, steel, non ferrous metallurgy oll education is no longer free. where conditions were better than industry, building trades: It is in the country. As the housing, st months. That is, approximSCHOOL INACCESSIBLE living and working conditions ately the time it will actually take TO POOR krew more and more intolerable to fully organize the draft.
The average wage of a Soviet the peasants preferred to remain workers below 200 roubles a on the land. With the inception ENSLAVING YOUTH month; the mass of the peasantry of the Third Five Year Plan The bureaucracy avows, in so earns far less. Secondary school (1938. the flow of peasants was many words, that it cannot oper ing is therefore inaccessible to reduced to a trickle. The pas ate Soviet Industry today and has the song and daughters of work sage of the June laws has evi no prospect of operating Soviet iners and peasants, and within dently shut off even this trickle dustry in the future except by reach only of the privileged pro. The acute shortage of labor was enslaving the youth of the coun geny of governmental party and further aggravated by the mobil try, by chaining them to industry trade union bureaucrats, funcization of vast armies.
just as it has sought to chain the tionairies of the GPU, labor arisadult workers. That is its protocracy (Stakhanovists. factory ebild labor reads: The text of the ukase restoring gram on the threshhold of Comdirectors and administrators, en munism.
gineers, doctors, and so on. Thou In our country unemploy. It may be argued that by em.
sands of children who had already ment has been destroyed, pov ploying child labor the bureau.
started the current school year erty and pauperization in city cracy will be able to alleviate at must now leave the secondary and country forever abolished. least partially the crisis now conschools, not to mention those poor and in view of all this we Pulsing Soviet industry. In any students still able to penetrate haven got people who would case, succeed in smashing the res.
into the universities and techno be compelled to knock at fac istance of the workers to the June logical institutes.
tory gates and beg admission laws. Moscow fervently hopes so into the factories. thus spon But other and much more immo AMERICAN PRESS SILENT taneously forming a constant dlate consequences must flow Not a word of this has been al reserve of labor power for in from this ruthless attempt to en.
leak out in the American dustry.
slave the youth. It is as if Stalin press. In the last of a series o articles purportedly devoted to the All spontaneous sources of was deliberately bent on convinc cultural and economical well be: adult labor supply have been ing every child in the Soviet Un. shut off by the fatal regime of enemy of the youth whom he has ion that his regime is the mortal ing of the people of the USSR.
featured by the Daily Worker, one the bureaucracy. But it adults enter Stanley writes: After the Re cannot be compelled to knock at how expropriated not only polit volution the doors of universities there still remains the youth. Un DRIVEN INTO BLIND ALLEY factory gates and beg admission. Ically, but culturally and socially, were thrown wide open to all the able to get adult workers, the Except for a thin layer of priv.
working people. Daily Worker. Kremlin proposes to tap the reser ileged and exempt children, the November 16. voir of child labor, to create by nass of the Soviet youth can no He torgets to mention a trife ukase hereditary Industrial serfs. longer cherish any illusions about newly added by Stalin: tuitions.
This article is dated, Moscow, No DRIVEN OUT OF SCHOOLS their future. In the period of the vember 15, six weeks after the furst two Five Year Plans, these The chairmen of collective illusions Wait till we finish the publication of the above decrees, farms are instructed by law to Second Five Year Plan and enter six weeks after all the working designate two children) for ev. Communism. played an enor people were kicked out through ery 100 members of the collective mous role in stabilizing the the wide open doors. Mr. Stanley farm.
is under orders to suppress the least one.
Smaller collectives, at sime. Driven into a blind alley In the urban centers, the youth has no perspective, no fate of one of the remaining con the city soviets will do the des alternative other than to engage quests of the October revolution. ignating with this afference in an open struggle for self presAs for the capitalist press the that city quotas are not fixed in editors are well informed but keep advance. in other words, the ur ervation. Stalin has lit the fuse sitent lest the diplomatic nego han youth will be driven into in plosive power.
to a charge with the greatest extiations between Washington and dustry at a speed depending upon Moscow be hindered unnecessar the circumstances. But this child have already been taken by the The first steps in this struggle ily.
STALINIST BOAST In order to create such a spon younger workers in the resistfreilities so precious to all the sable to drive the children of duce buie intensity tenfold this What about other educational taneous reserve it was indispen, October legislation will not re Friends of the Soviet Union workers and peasants, the overThe same Stanley in the same ar whelming majority of the Soviet resistance. They have acquired powerful ally in the youth of Licle still boasts brazenty: But children, out of schools. And so the land, especially the song and the network of educational Instithey were driven.
tutions is not limited to ordinary Child labor cannot operate moddaughters of the millions recently schools. There is also a wide ern industry, This, by the way, incorporated into the Soviet Fed eration.
network of correspondence courses was one of the reasons the bouravailable to all Soviet citizens. goisie wag amenable, under work. BUREAUCRACY Thus, while continuing to work SEES DANGER in the factory, office or on the Nor is the bureaucracy blind to collective tarm, one may qualify the danger. But it deludes itself for the degree of engineer, teach.
with the assurance that the total Crazy as a Fox er, agronomist etc.
itarian machine of repressions Stalin pen prostitute again After months of stalling will again see it through. All the obeys orders. The readers of the around, a federal court the gears of the apparatus are grind.
Daily Worker must not learn that other day finally denied the ling overtime. The party and the correspondence courses are hencecontention of the attorneys of Komsomol (Russia YCL) have or forth restricted likewise to those Hopson, Associated Gas lers to engage in vast political a ho have the cash in their pockets and Electric system executive Lass activities which will insure to pay one half of the respective that he was mentally unbal the fulfillment of the ukase, and school and university fees. The anced, and ordered him to in particular obtain a considerable Soviet press even conducting a stand trial for milking some Dood of voluntary declarations of campaign to place lectures at 20 millions from the stock enrollment in the schools (read: clubs, enterprises, collective farms holders of his company. child labor army. All campaigns on a paid admission basis. Peo. Hopson doctors had testiin the press have been sidetrackple, it appears, don like free lec fied that he was lacking in ed in favor of this latest one.
tures.
spontaneity, worried too Newspapers shriek hysterically The official motivation of the much had a sensation of about the unanimous approbation enltural expropriation of the So. wandering about through cel.
of these great historic decrees, vict youth follows: rave about the great uplift of al After duly considering the lars and basements and had a compulsion to lie abed all leged factory mass meetings all higher level of material wel. the time.
equally inanimous: and, above fare of the toilers and the con.
all, greet ecstatically the least rusiderable sums expended by the If it takes insanity to cause a utilities magnate to swindle mor of voluntary enrollments.
Soviet government on conIt is as if Stalin intended to leave structing equipping and main20 million bucks. then all the nothing undone in exposing to ev.
taining the incessantly expandrest of the capitalists must be ery child in the Soviet Union the ing network of secondary and raving bug house material. methods and inner mechanics of highest educational instituhis rule.
Vultee Strike lowed to The fate of the trade unions in France is an ominous warning to the trade unions in the United States. In France the workers made tremendous gains, including the 40 hour week, vacations with pay. In 1936 they could have gone a step farther and placed a genuine workers government in power. But they failed to do that and instead began conceding to the offensive of the bosses.
First they accepted chiselling on hours and wages. Then they accepted wholesale increases in hours, wholesale decreases in wages in the face of mounting cost of living. They gave up their 40hour week. All this was done in the name of national unity, and national defense.
But when the Nazi machine rolled over the frontiers, the bosses sold out. They sold out the French workers who had been stupid enough to believe what the bosses told them.
Now the Vichy government has dissolved the trade unions in France by decrec. It is against the law in France to belong to a trade union. All the union funds and union property have likewise been confiscated by the government.
The bosses begin with chiselling on hours and wages, but in time of war they end up by wiping out the trade unions. Let the fate of the French trade unions not be lost upon the American workers!
When more than 3, 000 workers at the Vultee aircraft plant went out on strike for a rise in wages, the employers screamed like a hog with its foot in a noose.
And in order to save the poor employers who are going broke on a backlog of 84, 000, 000 in orders for planes, with reasonable profits guaranteed and the industry expanding at an incredible rate in view of unlimited future orders, government agents swooped down from all sides.
There is good reason for this alarm on the part of the bosses and their government agents. Success for the workers in the Vultee strike can give the impetus that will lead to complete unionization of the airplane industry and provide such a spurt to the labor movement as it has not received since the great days of the first CIO upsurge.
The FBI as usual cried out Reds! And claimed to have scooped the Dies Committee in uncovering these subversive elements on strike at Vultee. Which should prove an object lesson to the 3, 000 Vultee workers that the FBI and the Dies Committee are agencies of the bosses and that a red in their language is a worker with enough militancy to stand up for his rights.
the Dies Committee and the FBI now have a new competitor in the field. None other than the New Leader, organ of the Social Democratic Federation, which claims that it is devoted to the interests of the labor movement.
This rag expresses its devotion to the labor movement by crying out in a front page headline of its Nov. 23 issue: Reds Cripple Vital Plane Production at Vultee.
Like the FBI and the Dies Committee, the New Leader feels it a personal insult that a rise in pay should even be mentioned to bosses rapidly becoming millionaires out of the armament business.
Together with the FBI and the Dies Committee, the New Leader is acting the role of a strikebreaker at Vultee. The New Leader is interested in labor the same way an executioner is interested in getting his victim into the electric chair without a struggle.
power.
Cynical Propaganda In order to make the Second World War for profits and colonies more palatable, the entire capitalist press is busy painting up the Allies of Wall Street as simon pure democracies fighting for all that America stands for.
While European workers are still only aliens subject for hounding by the Dies Committee, their capitalist governments allied with Wall Street have been covered with a coon skin cap and enrolled in the ranks of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
The New York Times for instance in its issue of November 18, declares in relation to the war between Italy and Greece that Two forces are at work here: totalitarianism and democracy.
This is just about as cynical a declaration as the Times has seen fit to print in some time. It is well known that Greece is governed by a totalitarian dictatorship with as brutal and cruel record in repression of workers organizations as the bloodiest of them. We may be sure that if Metaxas had seen fit to swing into the orbit of Berlin instead of London, the Times would have likewise seen fit to drag out his evil record as a totalitarian dictator and print it with appropriately scathing comment, including perhaps even his imprisonment of members of the Fourth International.
But where profits are concerned, the capitalist press is also concerned that they are covered with the sweetest smelling names. In this respect they stop at no lie no matter how brazen, even to calling Metaxas a democrat and Roosevelt a friend of labor.
Tampico Incident Last week when the press reported that war ships of unknown nationality had caused the scuttling of one German freighter a few miles from Tampico and the return of three others to port, the Socialist Appeal made the supposition that these warships were American warships and that their action constituted the first step of military participation by the United States in World War No.
Additional information now confirms this supposition.
On November 18, Tampico port authorities reThe people of Martinique, reports the article want to come under the wing of the and the 250. 000 inhabitants of the island are on the verge of revolution, but have no arms to rise against the rulers.
What is this but the classic formula of imperialist conquest? The islands are a rich prize; enemy forces are free to utilize them; the people are starving; they want to come under the imperialist wing: they are even ready to carry out a revolution if they are aided with arms all this sounds like Hitler him self announcing the formula for further expansion.
Imperialism speaks the same language the world over!
TIME TO LEARN SPANISH!
For the workers of the United States the expan.
sion of American imperialism southward increases the need for stronger ties with the workers of Latin America in order to obtain greater unity and striking power against the common enemy.
Wallace example is not bad it is time to learn to speak Spanish!