Marxists’ Internet Archive: ETOL Home Page: Trotskyist Writers Section: Farrel Dobbs
Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 21, 24 May 1948, p. 1.
Transcription & Mark-up: Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Less than three years after the termination of the Second World War we are threatened with the imminent outbreak of another war. Within the lifetime of one generation, we have gone through a vicious cycle of war; then depression; then another war; then the present inflation; and the frenzied preparation for a Third World War. This is the cycle of capitalism – war, depression, inflation, and again war.
The capitalist masters of America and their political tools at Washington are deliberately plotting and preparing to drag the American people into another war. Capitalist production for profits cannot be reconciled with peace and prosperity for the people.
Hardly two years after converting industry to peacetime production, the home market is already saturated. The workers can buy back only a small portion of what they produce, and the ruinous inflation, combined with a refusal to grant even a cost-of-living wage increase, only aggravates the contradiction. The countries of Europe and Asia, ruined by the war, are unable to buy the surplus American goods. The ruling capitalists see no way of postponing the threatened depression, which will be far deeper and more devastating than that of the Thirties, than by shifting to an armaments economy in preparation for an actual war. In their minds, peace is identified with the demands of organized workers for a larger share of the products of their toil, for a greater degree of security. Peace is identified in the minds of the profit-mongers with the nation-wide strikes of the miners, railroad, packinghouse, auto and steel workers. They want to make an end of that. They want to break up the unions and free themselves from the necessity of dealing with organized workers.
The war which they are plotting and preparing is directed against the American people as well as against the rank and file of humanity throughout the world.
The drive against the unions was spearheaded by the passage of the anti-union Taft-Hartley law whose provisions are now being used to smash strikes with injunctions and police terror. The Steel Trust, giving the lead to the major corporations, has refused to disgorge a single penny of its fabulous profits for wage increases to meet the increased cost of living of workers in the mills.
The Chrysler Corporation, wallowing in excess profits, has forced its workers to strike for modest cost-of-living increases.
The packinghouse workers have been battling injunctions and police terror on the picket lines for more than two months.
With all my heart I greet the heroic auto and packinghouse strikers who are fighting the battle of all workers today.
The preparations for war coincide with preparations for military dictatorship at home. The major posts in the cabinet and the chief positions in important government agencies are occupied by the brass hats of the army and the navy or the overlords of industry and finance.
Under the direction and inspiration of this notorious Wall Street-Brass Hat combination, democratic rights and civil liberties are under constant attack. A bill to militarize the youth is being rushed towards passage. Government employes are subjected to Gestapo-like inquisitions. Congress itself is the scene of wild orgies of officially organized witch-hunting.
Foreign-born trade union leaders are picked up every day and held for deportation. The notorious Mundt Bill, now in preparation, would make all opposition to the military dictatorship a crime punishable by long prison sentences, by deportation and concentration camps.
The monopolists are determined to take all the colossal costs of the war out of the hides of the American workers.
Business Week, an authoritative Wall Street magazine, brutally admits to this purpose in its issue of April 24th. I quote: “Living standards would have to go down – not up ... we couldn’t fight another war without dictating to everyone where to work, what to do and what to get paid for it ... All the candy has been passed out now. This time there would be nothing left but the whip.”
So speaks Business Week, an authentic voice of the monopoly capitalists, who are the chief enemies of the American people.
This is the outspoken program of military dictatorship – the iron heel of the capitalist oligarchy stamping out the lives, the hopes and the liberties of the masses of American people.
The military dictatorship is the inexorable product of a system which is driven inevitably, by the iron laws of its own contradictions, and of its insoluble crisis, from one global war to another. The conclusion follows with the same inexorable logic:
There can be no effective struggle to defend the unions, to protect and improve the living standards of the workers, to safeguard and extend the rights and liberties of the American people, unless it is directed against the capitalist oligarchy and its agents in the bipartisan coalition which rules in Washington.
There can be no effective struggle against war unless it is directed towards the elimination of the war-breeding capitalist system; towards the destruction of the power of life and death over the entire human race now possessed by a handful of madmen.
There can be no effective struggle against the twin monsters of war and military dictatorship unless it is directed towards the establishment of a Workers and Farmers Government, which will organize this country and the world for a society based on human needs, without profits, classes or exploitation.
Only one party stands on the basis of such a program in the United States today. That is the Socialist Workers Party whose banner I shall be proud to carry in the coming presidential election campaign.
The party of Henry Wallace, despite its loud agitation for peace, disarmament and against internal repression, is not a genuine anti-war party, because it is not an anti-capitalist party.
A movement for peace pledged to disband at the outbreak of war is nothing but a mass swindle of the millions of people who have placed their confidence in this movement. The Communist Party, by supporting this Wallace swindle, is once again selling out the American workers to serve the momentary diplomatic interests of Stalin and his Kremlin gang.
There is another so-called peace party, not as large as the Wallace Party but just as loud in its anti-war pretensions. I am referring to the party of Norman Thomas. This party bears the name of the organization which once claimed Eugene V. Debs as its leader. But this is a cruel deception. Debs fought the First World War before official entry of the United States. He went to jail for continuing this struggle after the declaration of war by Congress. Norman Thomas and his cohorts betrayed the memory of Debs by jumping on the war bandwagon the day after the United States entered the war.
The struggle for socialism does not cease in time- of war. On the contrary those who quit the struggle when war breaks out cease to be socialists.
The Socialist Workers Party took its position in the tradition of Debs in the Second World War. It continued its struggle against war and capitalism, even though eighteen of its leaders suffered imprisonment for their fidelity to the working class and to the cause of socialism.
The Socialist Workers Party will continue the same uncompromising struggle today on the brink of the Third World War.
Workingmen and Workingwomen! In your great, numbers, and in your mass organizations, rests the power to stop this fatal plunge into war and dictatorship. You have the power to change everything.
Organize this invincible power!
Unite with the Socialist Workers Party!
Bind your ranks together with a socialist program, and begin the march to a world where we and our children can live in peace as free human beings without poverty and without fear!
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