Marxists’ Internet Archive: ETOL Home Page: Trotskyist Writers Section: Farrel Dobbs: Grace Carlson
Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 43, 25 October 1948, p. 1.
Transcription & Mark-up: Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
We have travelled thousands of miles and talked to millions, in person and over the radio, and always we have hammered on the main point: There is one overwhelming and decisive issue before the American people – War.
As sharply and unequivocally as we know how, we have repeated our basic theme: Either the workers and farmers take political power, set up a Workers and Farmers Government and establish a socialist peace; or capitalism in its death frenzy will level civilization under the atomic bomb.
All other crucial problems four times – inflation and depression, the destruction of civil liberties, the oppression of the Negro people, the abominable housing conditions – all these finally depend for their solution upon our ending the dominant evil, capitalist war.
The very preparations for war preclude even temporary and partial solutions of our grave social problems. How can we build millions of needed new homes, when the capitalist government diverts huge quantities of labor and materials into building the mightiest military force ever known? How can we keep prices down, when Washington drains $45 billion dollars a year from our pockets for the war budget? How can we safeguard civil rights, when the militarists and jingoes are trying to whip the people into docile industrial slaves and bomb-fodder for the conduct of total War?
And this is nothing compared to what war itself will bring us. Even capitalist publications like U.S. News admit that in this next war the American people will suffer not less than 9 to 10 million casualties; labor will be placed under an iron military heel; we will spend not less than 500 million dollars; the national debt will pile up to as much as 750 billion dollars; production of all consumers goods will be halted and the dollar won’t be worth ten cents.
Surely this prospect – and it is one of terrible immediacy – overshadows all other questions. Surely it should be the question of greatest urgency and discussion in this election campaign.
Yet both Truman and Dewey have declared that the question of foreign policy – of war or peace – “is not an issue in politics.” On this gravest of questions, they demand a single- minded “unity.” And any who would raise the issue, or cast doubts upon the bi-partisan war course, they brand as “subversive” and threaten with suppressive laws and prosecution.
Why do they fear to bring this life-and-death question before the American people? Why do they threaten any party, like ours, which dares to examine this question publicly and demands that the people themselves, by referendum vote, decide this issue on which rests their whole future and the fate of humanity?
Because this conspiracy to once again plunge the American nation into war cannot stand the light of day, cannot bear full and free discussion. Because, this war conspiracy hatched by the bankers and brass hats can only be put over on a docile, confused and unwary people, who are not in possession of the facts.
Why is the Wall Street money oligarchy plunging into a new war adventure? Are they madmen? They are driven by the very system itself to expand and crush all rivals just as were the German industrialists and bankers before the last world war. American capitalist economy would be in mortal crisis today if the government expenditures for war preparations did not prop up production.
American capitalist economy with its tremendous accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, with the ever-growing lag between expanding productive capacity and diminishing purchasing power of the masses, is pushed inexorably to reach out for control of the world, to eliminate all competitors in the world market, to seize every possible field for new investments for idle capital.
Grasp this reality, fellow workers of America! The profit system breeds wars. All the propagandist talk about defending democracy against totalitarianism is deception. If the brutal Stalinist regime did not exist, U.S. capitalism would find other pretexts for war just as it did in 1917 and 1941.
That is why Wallace lies when he says his program can prevent war. Remember, Wallace boasts that he is “the best friend of capitalism.” He upholds and defends the profits system. If he demagogically seeks votes today by his fake promise of “peace,” tomorrow as he already has promised he will support U.S. Imperialism if and when it goes to war. Because Wallace believes in capitalism first and foremost, he can only disarm and mislead any anti-war movement, and betray it at the crucial moment.
As for Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party, he supported American imperialsm in the second world war and has already promised to support it again in the next world war.
Our record, the courageous conduct of our leaders in the face of persecution and jail sentences, is convincing proof that the SWP is a genuine fighter against capitalist war, is the only real anti-war party. But aren’t we too small to be effective? Isn’t it better to vote for a bigger party, like Wallace’s, despite its support of capitalism, and thus pile up a big protest vote against war?
That is false thinking. The capitalists are not afraid of fake anti-war movements, regardless of their size. Sometimes they even help organize them to head off effective opposition. The only real, the only effective fight against war and the preparations for war is the fight to take power out of the hands of the war makers and place it in the hands of the representatives of the workers and farmers. That is why a vote for the SWP on Nov. 2 is the most effective way of building the anti-war forces and staying the hands of the war-makers, the most effective way of giving new hope and courage to the left wing forces throughout the country, the most effective way of transforming the socialist movement into a movement of masses and summoning the American people to the struggle for a Socialist America.
VOTE SWP ON NOV. 2!
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