SOCIALIST APPEAL TUESDAY, JUNE 9, 1939 SOCIALIST APPEAL Vol. 111, No. 40 June 9, 1939 Published twoice a soeck by the SOCIALIST APPEAL PUBLISHING ASSN.
at 116 University Place, New York, Telephone Alconquin 854 Butacriptions: 32. 00 per year: 00 for six months. For eten: 00 per year, 11. 60 for six months. Bundle orders cents per copy in the United States: cents per copy in all forelan countries. Single coples: centa.
Bronx and Manhattan subscriptions are: 1, 50 for six months: 00 for one year. Reentered as second class matter February 16, 1989. At the post office at New York, under the Act of March Stalin Decree on Agriculture Is Their Indication of Conditions in USSR Government Editor.
MAX SHACHTMAN Associate Editors: HAROLD ROBERTS FELIX MORROW Stap Members: JOSEPH HANSEN EMANUEL GARRETIUM Manager: 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! 30 weekly minimum wage 30 hour weekly maximum for all workers on All Jobs. Thirty dollar 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.
Mooney and Beal Letters Show How Spain Cause Was Sacrificed and for What Minnesota Acts Labor in Minneapolis, and in its Twin City sister, St. Paul, has set the pace more than once for the working class movement of this country. This is especially true of the teaming crafts, who have blazed a trail for labor progress throughout the Northwest.
True to this tradition was the militant demonstration of 5, 000 workers in the Twin Cities which took place last week and is reported elsewhere in this issue. The workers manifested their determination not to lie down quietly while the cynical ruling class and its legislative agents continue to cut the relief scale to the bone and to throw additional thousands off the rolls every month.
The unemployed the millions of them who continue to suffer after almost ten years of the crisis have no way out of their increasing misery save by fighting aggressively in an organized manner. They are faced literally with a fight for life. Passivity, crawling, whining, begging for favors, hoping for miracles those will only result in reducing them to ever lower levels.
It organized, militant struggle or starvation.
If the Stassens and Roosevelts, the Republicans or Democrats, do not encounter stormy resistance from the unemployed, they will just continue to cut and cut and cut, so that capitalist profits and the war machine may grow and grow and grow. Nothing can be expected from the rival relief cutters.
The workers employed and unemployed must take things into their own hands. No one will save them from wretchedness but themselves. Let them mobilize their invincible strength to. Open the idle factories!
All war funds to the unemployed! Twenty Billion Dollar Public Works and Housing program! job and a decent living for every worker!
Expropriate the 60 Families!
Havana press: Under this pressure, Cuban of ficials unfortunately weakened and rescinded th: original order of admission.
By James Burnham They unfortunately weakened these brave, tough military heroes of democracy! They weren weak when they murdered scores of revolutionary workers and students. They weren Pointing to the Growth of Landlord Peasants at the weak when their machine guns, pistols and Expense of the Collectives, the Decree Exposes an Omsabres mowed down their radical opponents. But inous and Widening Crack in Stalinized Soviet Economy unfortunately they were weak when the antiSemitic jackals began to howl. Continued from Page 1) 11 the norm of the decree is first place, it proves once again On June the Administration completed a very Do not think for a moment that the Stalinists certain farm the shortage of fulfilled, the allegedly collecti. what, in truth, needs no more shrewd partisan maneuver by forcing a record labor caused by the members vized agriculture of the Soviet proof that the agricultural vote in the House of Representatives on the Town will therefore weaken in their love and admira engaged in individual enter Union, the great triumph of problem cannot be solved bu send Plan. There are probably less than a dosen tion for Batista. Not at all. They ll continue to prise had resulted in failure to Stalinist realism, would be in reaucratically. Not all the de Congressmen who really favor the Townsend Plan build the necessary farm struc actuality only a fourth or a crees of the Kremlin nor all the However, in many sections of the country, espec.
burn incense before him. They ll continue to tures, in allowing mown hay to fifth collectivized. There is no guns and isolators of the ially in New England and the Middle West, the send hacks like Mike Gold to write drunken pae rot in the fields and in necessi other way to interpret the fig can in the long run get any Republicans found it convenient and even necesans of publicity about the delights and charms tating cost of 12, 000 rubles ures. Whatever the legal forms where. The peasants return to sary to make an opportunistic bid last autumn for of Batista rule.
the support of Townsend followers. During the great bulk of honest collective population spends only a fourth the Times correspondent imag election campaign, Republican candidates pledged Why? Because Batista is one of Roosevelt farm members received only or fifth of its working time ines, because of the age old themselves, openly or by implication, to the Plan good boys. Why? Because Roosevelt is for a 90 rubles each for a year evidently much less, in fact) instinct for private profit, but The expectation of the Republicans was doubt new War for Democracy and so are the Stal work, while one pseudo collec at collectivist production and because of the frightful misless that a day of reckoning on the pledge could inists.
the rest at individual produc management of the collectives be indefinitely postponed. The Plan could, in ac.
that by a day work repairing tion, then agriculture is only by the central and local bucordance with a usual custom, be buried in ComAnd what, in the face of the Interests of De somebody porch. Repairing to that extent collective. reaucracy, because of the failmittee. Or, at worst, if it came to the floor, the mocracy, does the fate of a few hundred miserwhose porch, by the way? Cer This seems a curious state ure to provide sufficient of the cowardly method of avoiding a record vote, now able refugees amount to?
tainly not the honest collective of affairs for a country where machinery upon which large. common in the House, could be employed.
farmers, who hadn earned socialism has already. we are scale agriculture depends, and But here was an opportunity made to order for enough to pay for the repairs. told, been definitely achieved because of the entire failure to all sections of the Democratic Party, constituting and where there are no classes. give the peasants an adequate THE REAL EXTENT It seems, also, a rather nega return in manufactured goods. majority. The Republicans have been trying to OF COLLECTIVIZATION make big propaganda on the issue of economy. tive result to have achieved It is the disproportion and How deep and widespread after the wiping out of five or breakdown in Soviet economy They are also, many of them, pledged to the huge extravagance of the Townsend Plan. Very well.
the individualized farming has ten million peasants in order and polity generally that brings Tom Mooney spent some of the best years of become is even more striking to complete the Stalinist pro about the reversion in agriculForce a record vote on the Plan. Then the Repubhis life in a California penitentiary. He was ly shown by the proposals in gram of collectivization. ture to more primitive forms licans are in a perfect dilemma: if they vote against the Plan, they have broken their pledges the decree for correction. At the same time, the condirailroaded to prison by the reactionary open minimum number of work days FOR MACHINERY TERROR NO SUBSTITUTE tions indicated by the decres and lose the Townsendite support; if they vote for it, they explode their own economy issue.
to be spent on the collective indicate a widening and ominshop interests on the West Coast in one of the farm, as against days on indi As a penalty for violation of ous crack in the Soviet econoThe parliamentary jockeying went on for weeks.
most abominable frame ups known to modern vidual holdings, is set. Pre the decree, expulsion is promy. The more successful of The record vote was forced; and, since the dilemma was genuine, there is no doubt that by it the This decree will fit in the individually operating peashistory. He was set free when the protesting over the number now being with the program that the gov. ants (above all, the landlord sumably this minimum is well vided.
Republicans were thrown for a loss.
voices of the workers in this country and else spent teleb ethere would be most comment. Sportingea de sannshed bean the decrees are members The Times Is Morally Indignant where could no longer be ignored.
sections, according to the sparsely populated regions, es of a class, a class alien to the The Plan received 97 affirmative votes, includ few thousand miles from Mooney old Times report, the minimum is pecially the Volga and the Far proletariat and capable in a ing one third of the Republican votes in the House eighty days; sixty days in the East. Once more the terrible time of open crisis of becoming The New York Times the next morning devoted prison cell, clear across the country, sits another northern and central district: fate of being driven to the the backbone of a revisionist Its lead editorial to the outcome. The Townsend victim of frame up justice. He is the courag. and a hundred in the cotton wastelands by the whips of the movement. The centrifugal Plan B111, the Times begins. has been defeated growing regions. hangs over the peasants forces in Soviet life, present in in the House by a vote of 302 to 97, and the councous, militant textile worker, Fred Beal. He These figures are in the who come into the disfavor of any case from the nature of the try is doubtless expected to breathe easier. The was one of the fearless pioneers who sought to highest degree remarkable the bureaucracy.
country and its isolation but Times dismisses the Plan itself with an economie Leaving aside the farms which Two considerations come at fostered and advanced by Stal flourish: The Townsend Plan is utterly fantastic.
bring unionism to the bitterly exploited workers are not yet collectivized even once to mind after reflection inism, strain ever closer to vlo It would call for an astronomical expenditure by of the South. He led that magnificent strike in name, they mean that even upon this new decree. In the lent explosion.
the Federal Government in the neighborbood of 20, 000, 000, 000 year. If any attempt were made struggle of the North Carolina textile slaves in to raise such a sum by taxation it would lead to Gastonia about ten years ago. The Bourbons deeconomic chaos.
But this economic argument is, as often, pot determined to get him; and they did. Like Mooney, cisive for the Times. It is to a moral argument Fred Beal was railroaded to prison on a against the Plan that the Times makes its final appeal. The point is well worth pondering: trumped up charge. Even if the plan were workable it would imThe difference between the Mooney and Beal pose a monstrously unfair distribution of income.
It would place crushing taxes on our population cases lies in the fact that Beat is being kept in That Stalin was directly re other words, instead of giving say. His ponderous generalizawith its average per capita income of about 550 sponsible for the suicidal policy them the land, the peasants tion merely provides the peg to year in order that less than one tenth of that jail not only by the textile barons, but with the imposed on the Spanish work were to get the usual bourgeois conclude that the parliamenpopulation should receive per capita incomes of connivance of the Communist party and its dirty es tend peasants is now proven panacea of more equitable tary way1. e. bourgeois road is best for Spain. 2, 400 a year.
hirelings. The Stalinists cannot forgive him for icy and signed by Stalin him As for the factories. Stalin Not the needs of the interThe injustice of such income arrangements is self, sent to the then Premier declared national situation were served apparently, self evident to the editors of the having expressed himself so frankly and criticalTimes.
Caballero and now released by It would be necessary to by this vicious travesty of ly about conditions in the Soviet Union which caballero associate, Luis Ara attract to the side of the gov Marxism. but the needs of Let Not the Right Hand.
he was able to observe while he lived and worked quistain.
ernment the small and middle Stalin Bonapartist clique, who Published in facsimile in the there. They have been engaged in actively sabbourgeoisie or, in any event. fear nothing in the world so But the editors of the Times falled, perhape, to to give them the possibility of much as the fresh breath which read carefully the contents of their own paper otaging any effort to obtain Beal release. They New York Times, June stalthe pol taking a neutral position, fa would flow into Russia from a that morning. If they had turned to a page preced have cynically trampled under foot the most ele icy of keeping Azana and other vorable to the government, successful proletarian revoluing that on which their editorial appeared, they traitors in power, appeasing mentary principles of labor solidarity.
protecting them against at tion elsewhere.
would have found an instructive news report deal In presenting Stalin letter ing with incomes for the year 1937.
Mooney now is free. Fred Beal is not. We the Chamberlain and Daladier tempts at confiscation and governments, giving the fac suaranteeing them, within Araquistain seeks to absolve There they would have discovered that for the would like to see Tom Mooney, the most re tories and land back to the possible limits, freedom of Caballero from responsibility year 1937 forty nine individuals in the United nowned class war prisoner of our time in this treacherous trade. Otherwise these groups for collaborating in this foul capitalists and States reported to the Treasury Department net country, raise his voice in a call to all labor to landowners and thus crushing will become fascists.
incomes in excess of one million dollars. When it The truth is very difThe middle bourgeoisie ferent. Stalin letters were recalled that the net income figure is arrived at fight for Beal freedom.
the masses, was dictated to the e. the native industrial over. sent to Caballero when, as Sfter a hundred and one deductions for taxes, contributions, exemptions, credits, pseudo losses and under threat of cutting off the and returning them to their eco was working hand in glove with all the other devices thought up by high priced skimpy Russian supplies if nomic power enabled them to the Stalinists, when the Stalin lawyers, the excess over one million dollars must The War Department announces the award of a Stalin orders were not obeyed. sabotage Loyalist struggle ist press was proclaiming Ca be very considerable indeed. One individual, even contract calling for 814 army trucks, cost over 1, 000, 000. This is the largest single contract for The most important letter foreign this Franco Standstalents ballero Internationally as the with all deductions, reported net income of over five million dollars for that year. Spanish Lenin and he in turn motor vehicles made in a number of years. The had delivered into Stalinist Now, if we apply the very same reasoning that one and one half ton trucks will be used by Na at a time when the revolution crushed and assassinated and ary struggle against Franco imprisoned the flower of the hands the control of the Span the Times used in proving the Townsend Plan un tional Guard units all over the country for quick mobilization and rapid transportation in any emerwas still strong. The factories Spanish proletariat.
just, we seem to be led inexorably to a remarkish Socialist Youth, the gency. That is, whenever the workers get the idea able conclusion.
were then in the hands of the STALIN THEORY TO (General Workers Union. the workers committees, the land JUSTIFY COUNTER of striking for better working conditions.
key positions in the armed The million dollar plus Incomes are admittedly had been seized and was being REVOLUTION forces, etc. Only by recalling possible because of capitalism, or what the Times sometimes calls the system of free enterprise.
tilled by the peasants collec In advancing this counter the identity between Caballero tives and councils, the workers revolutionary program, Stalin and his associates and the StalSo, using the argument of the editorial, we are militias were still the backbone embellished it by a theoreti Inists at that time can one un compelled to say: Even if capitalism were workof the armed forces, and even cal introduction: that the derstand the frankness with able it would impose a monstrously unfair disthough they formally sat in the Spanish revolution plots its which Stalin transmitted his tribution of income. It would place crushing burSpeaking at a dinner for 1, 500 prominent government, no real power was course, different from many advice signed by. his own dens on our population with its average per capita income of about 550 a year in order that less business men at the World Fair, Secretary of being wielded by the bourgeois. viewpoints from the course fol. hand.
Azanas and Barrios who had lowed by Russia This is de The rats are falling out than. 00004 of that population should receive per Commerce Harry Hopkins clarified for their facilitated Franco rising and termined by the difference in among themselves. They are capita incomes of 1, 000, 000 plus a year.
benefit what President Roosevelt means by his who were ready to yield to him. social, historical and geographi telling the truth about each good neighbor policy in Latin America. Stalin letter demanded a re cal conditions and by the needs other. The terrible defeat in And As for Economics versal of all these revolution of the international situation, Spain is a warning: free your So much for the moral argument. But the eco He described in detail the lucrative fields of ary measures against Franco: different from those the Russian selves from the stranglehold of nomic argument which the Times uses against the investment south of the Rio Grande, and the DESTROY REVOLUTION, revolution had to contend with. Stalinism, workers, or you will Townsend Plan applies no less fully against the need for increasing economic penetration of WAS STALIN DEMAND Just precisely what are these share the fate of the Spanish system which the Times so solicitously defends.
differences? Stalin does not people.
those fields. It is above all necessary Could any system be more utterly fantastic than one which destroys food which people need But the United States must recognize the be assured of the continuance that the covernment should to eat, throws millions who want to work out of rights and the feelings of the inhabitants of of Azana and his group in jobs, shuts factories while goods are everywhere these countries to make their own laws and conneeded, suppresses inventions and new techniques, power, doing everything possible to help them overcome plunges all mankind into wars from which no one trol their economic development. Hence the their hesitation. This is but a handful of super financiers benefits?
THIS IRISHMAN and number. good neighbor policy: greater domestic manA crowd had essary in order to prevent The Times estimates that the Townsend Plan STOOD HIS GROUND gathered and were with me agement of foreign financed enterprises in Latin the enemies of Spain from would cost the Federal Government 20, 000, 000, 000 Editor: against the cop. few workconsidering her as a Commua year. But according to the government own America, a domestic management which will welcome the participation of United States nist republic, and to forestall went down to Washington ers yelled out that it was Social Justice or the American times this, at least 100, 000, 000, 000 a year: this thus their open intervention, and Essex Streets with three it would be ok. He asked for imperialism which constitutes the greatfigure being the difference between the actual out other comrades and started to my permit and started looking put of goods and services and that which the proThe agreement signed recently by Roosevelt est danger for republican sell Appeals. Along comes a it over. Then he called another Spain.
ductive plant of the country is immediately cap and Dictator Somoza of Nicaragua exemplifies big Irish cop and tells me to cop for a brain trust session.
able of Thus ordered Stalin. He was move on because can sell About 100 people were crowdthe general policy described by Hopkins.
The editors of the Times had better be more obeyed. With the result that there since m disturbing the ing around and the cops asked Instead of subduing the Latin American peo Azana group used their gov people going by and yelling too me to please stop talking loud suggest Ideas that would be most awkward for careful of the arguments they use. They might ple by armed force imposed from the outside in ernmental power to betray the much. answer bim by stat as was attracting too much among others, the editors themselves.
the shape of battleships and marines as has been cause of Loyalist Spain, finally ing that have the right to sell attention. During all this was only too frequently the procedure in the past, ing to Franco. The same on the streets. He answers that our slogans against Fascism Billy Rose, the Broadway impresario, meets the local murderers like Somoza bloody violent Azana Stalinist combination ac he doesn care if have a per. and how to fight it with Work problem of feeding an elephant by giving him candy bars before the regular meal. He found this dictators thirsty for Uncle Sam patronage cepted the non intervention mit. Then he went further and ers Defense Guards. Finally, fraud which directly facilitated said that no Irishman can sell the two cops came out of their cut down the beast appetite considerably. We will be furnished with arms and financial sup the intervention of Germany the Socialist Appeal from Mos huddle and told me it was ok. may expect the Relief Administration to look into port to reduce their country to the status of a and Italy.
cow. and (me being an to sell this matter shortly.
company town dominated by United States im Stalin ordered the factories Irishman) d better move on Then they went away and and land returned to the Span or he pull me in. came back many workers commended me The number of men involved in the newly insti perialism. This is the long range program de ish and foreign bourgeoisie. at him with the Bill of Rights for my stand against the cops. tuted British conscription plan was estimated at scribed by Hopkins.
The only decrees specifically and the Constitution and said Many of the workers bought about 310, 000 annually, not counting reductions When Roosevelt says good neighbors he proposed by Stalin for the peas. d have him investigated. Appeals.
due to exemptions, e. of cripples, imbeciles, and antry. significantly. refer to Then pulled out a pencil and Comradely.
means good colonies.
those sons whose parents are too well heeled to the question of taxes in paper and asked for his name Boston policy Good Neighbors Refugees in Cuba WORKERS FORUM There are few more harrowing stories of anguish and persecution than that of more than 900 Jewish refugees from Germany. men, women and children who are kept in the purga tory of the liner Saint Louis in Atlantic waters, between the inferno of fascist Germany, from which they were driven, and what they hoped was the paradise of Cuba, which has refused to admit them.
From the Nazi swine, the Jewish victims of the Aryan supermen expected nothing but what they got. But they did look forward to the government of Cuba to provide them with a haven. They thought that Cuba, unlike Ger many, was a modern democracy where racial discrimination and anti Semitism were not tolerated. Instead they found a regime which re pulsed them with the same brutality with which they were driven from Nazi Germany.
The Daily Worker feels rather embarrassed by the whole incident. Not so much for the sake of the refugees, but because it puts the new Stalinist hero, Col. Fulgencio Batista, military dictator of the Cuban democracy, in a dastardly light. All they find it possible to say about the Cuban regime is this referring to the anti Semitic campaign of the reactionary.