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Once more the old hue and cry is being raised against Trotskyism and the Trotskyists. This time, in England, where our co-thinkers have recently taken a great forward step through the fusion of all the Trotskyist forces into a unified organization, the Revolutionary Communist Party. On April 5 agents of Scotland Yard raided Trotskyist headquarters and meeting places simultaneously in London, Glasgow, Newcastle, Nottingham, Wallsend and other industrial centers, confiscating bundles of The Socialist Appeal, official organ of the English Trotskyists, carting away Marxist books, pamphlets, leaflets, all of which material has been publicly sold and distributed. No arrests have as yet been reported. The case, so far, is only “being prepared.”
The pattern is quite familiar. When Roosevelt-Biddle initiated their juridical frameup of the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in June 1941, the FBI likewise began with raids on headquarters of the American Trotskyists.
Our English co-thinkers are now suffering persecution as in the case of the 18 American Trotskyist leaders who were railroaded to federal penitentiaries essentially for remaining loyal in wartime as in peace to the cause of the working class; for fighting against further continuation of capitalist greed, profits, plunder and misrule; for refusing to suspend the struggle for socialism.
THE STRIKE WAVE IN GREAT BRITAIN
“Blood, toil, sweat and tears” for almost five years is impelling the English workers to seek with increasing insistence a way out of their inhuman degradation. Despite the entire coercive machinery of the capitalist state, despite its press, pulpit, and radio arrayed against them, despite the betrayals of their own official leaders, the English workers are exhibiting their inherent colossal power.
During the first week of April, 100,000 Yorkshire miners were on strike; 50,000 shipyard, aircraft, munitions workers were out in England, Scotland, and North Ireland. The British empire is now in the throes of the greatest working class ferment since the 1926 General Strike.
According to the April 7 Associated Press dispatch:
“The whole volcanic situation which Britain held in check through …. the machinery of arbitration is erupting in this fifth year of the war with every indication that 1944 will be the worst strike year since the paralyzing 1926 general walkout.”
Home Minister Herbert Morrison (Laborite), on orders from his master, Churchill, has set the special political police of Scotland Yard the task of unearthing “sinister influences”, “political mischief makers” and other such demoniac forces. (New York Times, April 3.)
THE REAL SOURCE OF ‘SINISTER INFLUENCE’
These cynical and calculating demagogues pretend that mass discontent and indignation are caused by a handful of “agitators,” “troublemakers,” “subversive elements.” They cannot permit the truth to reach the people. Yet they cannot prevent it. The same American correspondents who obligingly cabled the stereotyped slanders against the English Trotskyists were at the same time compelled to report the terrible plight of the English workers. An Associated Press dispatch from London on April 7 supplied the following data:
“The miners now are in the middle range of wage earners the basic minimum weekly pay to $20 for underground workers and $18 for surface workers …
“Here is how miners’ wages compare with other workers: The average of all classes of unskilled labor is now $18.75 a week. The average of male factory workers Is $22.78; the average for women factory workers $11.72. On this they pay an income tax of roughly 50 percent .” (Our emphasis.)
On April 8 E.C. Daniel cabled to the New York Times that the Daily Herald, organ of the British Labor Party, itself admitted that the miners’ revolt “is the consequences of a long experience of bad conditions; plus considerable distrust of the aims of the privileged class…. ”
Drew Middleton, London correspondent of the New York Times, cabled on April 9:
“Labor, that is the man who does his day’s work in a mine or a factory, is not satisfied with the explanation that the present strikes are the result of a ‘Trotskyite’ group of a few thousands …”
Helen Kirkpatrick, London correspondent of the New York Post and Chicago Daily News reported on April 5 that “the miners have a decided lack of confidence in their leaders and are demanding nationalization of the mines….. ”
LESSONS ASSIMILATED IN CLASS STRUGGLES
Even the suffocating and rigidly maintained censorship of Churchill and Company cannot keep the truths of the class struggle from breaking into the open. The living standards of the English workers have been driven down to barest subsistence levels, and lower. The responsibility for this rests squarely on the shoulders of Churchill and the capitalist class he so zealously serves.
The masses are filled with more than justifiable mistrust of this most corrupt and destructive ruling minority in the history of mankind. Bitter experience has taught the masses this mistrust. However small, at the present stage, may be the share of the English Trotskyists in inculcating this mistrust among the masses, it is to their everlasting credit. For the gravest crime today, the crime of sowing illusions of trust and confidence in the gangrenous system of capitalism is the first crime that must be exposed by those with the interests of the working class at heart. This mistrust is now extending to include the official British labor leaders …. And what in the conduct of these cowardly wretches merits anything except the stigmatizing label of treachery?
Churchill is now persecuting the English Trotskyists because they support the strikers in their just struggle; because they tell the workers the truth; because they are correctly generalizing the experience of the English workers, translating this experience into political terms and teaching the workers to think and act politically.
PERSECUTIONS WILL AVAIL THEM NOTHING
According to an April 6 Associated Press dispatch from London, Jock Haston, the national organizer of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party is reported to have issued the following statement to the British Press Association:
“If the government imagines that by closing us down and suppressing our publications they are going to stop the wave at strikes, they are mad.”
He went on to add:
“If the government nationalized the mines and operated them under committees of workers and technicians, they would settle the problem in twenty-four hours.”
These words ring genuine.
The vanguard of the English working class is on the move. Pressing behind the vanguard detachments now out on strike are the great masses, the millions of oppressed and disinherited. Today the struggle still occurs over economic issues. Tomorrow it will include the political discontent of the war-weary masses. The present sinister political truce between the conservatives and labor’s official leadership will be broken, unleashing a force that will sweep away the corrupt coalition of Tories and labor traitors.
It is this impending political explosion that has aroused the fury and fear of the ruling class of Britain and all its flunkeys, including the contemptible Stalinists who deny the justice of the strikers’ demands. It is this that impells the whole pack of labor’s enemies to lash out at the extreme left wing of the labor movement, the most conscious, consistent and incorruptible proletarian fighters, the Trotskyists.
But all their repressions will avail them exactly nothing. Churchill can no more halt the march of British labor to power than could his predecessor King Canute halt the advance of the tide upon the shores of England.
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