An Open Letter to Socailist
THOMAS, NORMAN
An Open Letter to Socialists By NORMAN THOMAS KIOT merely the magnitude of the *^ present crisis, but the driving force with which the administration is pushing its industrial recovery...
...Now it is one aspect of this Fascist danger that 1 want to discuss in the light of certain events and conditions within labor's own ranks and the ranks of the Socialist Party, especially in New York City...
...Let us look, then, at the furriers' situation...
...They got funds somehow— mi, committee did not discover how—to carry on and to hire a firm of Tammany lawyers to get an injunction, uncontested by the bosses, the first and principal provision of which was to prevent the bosses from hiring members of the left union, which promptly called a strike...
...Leonard A. Grass, president, of the Milwaukee Real Estate Board, demanded that the court hand the petitions over U> him, but the judge ruled that they were court property and belonged permanently in the court lecords...
...The better code in the bituminous coal industry is proof of the value of union organization even when its leadership is not one which can command Socialist approval...
...An Open Letter to Socialists By NORMAN THOMAS KIOT merely the magnitude of the *^ present crisis, but the driving force with which the administration is pushing its industrial recovery plans make NIKA the leading question of the hour...
...This is as bad tactics as it is bad ethics...
...Our state is not now Fascist, but what more could a Fascist state want...
...Communist tactics deliberately have made it impossible for nonCommunists over any long period of lime to work with their organizations...
...It tells the workers of the ceaseless campaign against capitalism...
...The secretly published Communist papers in Germany do not scruple to help the Fascists in this campaign of defamation against the Social Democrats...
...The last great strike was Communistled, or rather misled, and after it Communist leadership was discredited...
...I have indeed delayed publishing this letter in the hopo that I could unqualifiedly praise the present stand of the right wing union, but after the publicity this matter has received I cannot wait indefinitely to make my positioa clear...
...1 achievements immortal Have yet to be won by the hands Iqbor-orown...
...Against that approval, in the name of everything sincere in Socialist professions of faith in democracy and class solidarity, and socialist repudiation of the Com muniat tactics of "anything to win," I protest and call on Socialists to make the protest effective...
...In Germany the organized labor movement or the biggest part of it was under definite Soeialist inlluence...
...The signature rf a man "vh<> he<" been dead eight years, another -vhos* addreaa would place him in the Menomonee river, other addresses jvhich werechurches, vacant lots, vacant buildings and ends of blind alleys—these were some of the conditions found by workers checking petitions...
...sound trumpet...
...Though few of us enter the proud promise-portal, Yet wear it in thought like a glorious crown...
...Up, up from the slave-land...
...Delegates from New York will leave Grand Central Station at 8:45 Daylight Time...
...Communist or Communist-controlled dual unions have uniformally failed to meet the needs of the mass of workers...
...still less is it to deny that the proper course for the workers was to clean up and build up the old union, not leave it...
...That is what the injunction meant, as later even the court decided by admitting the left wing union into the case...
...A TIRELESS campaigner is your paper, The New Leader...
...Green—and, of course, all Socialists—saw the danger of it when Grover Whalen tried to stop Communist picketing by police force...
...It was far better organized and instructed than is our own labor movement...
...I call on Socialists beginning in New York City to act and act at once to clarify in the right direction the party's position bj specific repudiation of the direct ot indirect use of injunctions in I"*** labor disputes...
...Pres...
...How can we expect the work* ers to trust us to fight Tammaay if so-called Socialists in unions use or condone the use of Tammany fixers to get a capitalist government's aid...
...We have said: "The New Deal is state capitalism, not socialism...
...HITLERITE LYING ¦ ¦ Hitler and his accomplices, n«t content with a continuous orgy #f theft, murder, and aadistic tortures, are also making every effort to blacken the reputation of th* Socialist and labor leaders...
...Meanwhile, with the help of Jimmy Walker's old friend, Dudley Field Malone, the right wing union got publicity, which it did not contradict, to the effect that it would get the cooperation of the police and the city not to maintain the just right of its members to protection from violence, but to clean out Communists quite in the vein of Ralph Easley of the National Civic Federation...
...0 joy of the onset...
...You doubt it...
...Nevertheless, there are disquieting signs thst some unions or at any rate some union leaders are recklessly swallowing the administration's partnership cocktail in which the interests of absentee owners, workers and government are blended in one grand drink...
...Help secure results in the campaign by selling The New Leader at all meetings...
...Tins is not to rssume that indiscriminate striking is good, but that to prepare for effective striking may often render it less necessary, and far more successful when necessary...
...Hence my profound regret that not only the A. F. of L. but the Central Committee of the Socialist Party in New York City has justified the extraordinary procedure of the right wing union of-the furriers, without even hearing, so far as I am aware, non-Communist members—of whom there are many—of the left wing union...
...And if in controversies with dual unions it depends upon capitalist political alliances or a use of injunctions, already, labor is on the road to Fascism...
...In other words, the right wing leaders asked the government to help them do against one group of workers what they could not do themselves...
...Moreover, the structure of some unions is so thoroughly undemocratic and there has been about a few of them such a trace of racketeering that neither in spirit nor in effective technique can they express a vigorous democratic opposition to Fascism...
...Hoan Recall Fizzles Out MILWAUKEE...
...It is by no means certain that it can sufficiently increase spending power...
...President Green's stand on the steel code was admirablo and helped make that unsatisfactory code less bad than it might have been...
...And how can unions, built on injune* Hons directed against other workers, escape a drift to Fascism, i. e. to an American intolerant "totalitarian state" more powerful because unlabeled and unconscious...
...One bourgeois paper, the Frank' furter Zeitung, had the honesty and courage lb point out that it was written in 1921, when 4,000 marks were worth only 240 gold marks, or less than $00...
...Sessions will b«) held in the Labor Lyceum, Douglas and Kedzie Aves...
...Jewish Socialists Meet In Chicago Sept...
...I say this not because I favor dual union...
...But to use an injunction directly or indirectly against a dual union, even a Communist-controlled dual union, is to go far to justify the existence of such a union in the minds of the workers...
...but because I want to see them made obviously unnecessary...
...A recent example is the publication of an old letter by Theodor Leipart, head of the German Federation of Labor, asking for an increase of salary, in which ha said that his income was four thousand ..larks a month...
...In return for this, the right, I understand, made some declarations of loyalty to democracy and Socialism...
...In general, the Socialist position has been admirably, clearly and forcibly expressed, and where we are strong carried into action...
...But when Socialists condone after the event, without adequate investiga* tion, any method the rights have adopted, they do more harm to our cause than the lefts...
...The taxdodging real estate interests have admitted defeat in their battle to recall Daniel W. Hoan, who has been Socialist Mayor of the city for seventeen years...
...The reconstructed union which opposed the Communist partly in the name of democracy had no meetings for more than a year...
...15-17 THK Jewish Socialist Verband, * the Jewish language section of the Socialist party, will hold its national convention in Chicago September 15th, 10th and 17th...
...If we are not to drift over the falls of fascism to destruction, the time to awake ii now...
...i. e. wages in excess of prices, to avert disaster partially and temporarily...
...But so far as intimidation is concerned, that has been used not only by the lefts but, under bosses' pressure, against the lefts, even to the extent of murder...
...In connectior with the convention an excursion has been arranged by which it will be possible to attend the convention and visit the Chicago Century of I'rogresi for an extraordinarily low rate...
...This aid should be legal and financial...
...Instead of renouncing even temporarily the right to strike and overlooking its own internal problems, the A. F. of L. officially should be organizing machinery for aiding strikers especially in trades now unorganized...
...At the opening of the conventioa Friday night addresses will be delivered by Harry Rogoff and 3. Zivien of the Forward, Sol Rifkin, chairman of the Verband, Haim Kantorowitch, editor of UerWecker, organ of the Verband, and N. Chanin...
...Without a date, such a letter looks like damning evidence Oi parasitism...
...That within a few years it got a second chance, is due, as every observer knows, to right wing dissension, inefficiency, or worse...
...array us...
...And, it must for its very life's sake push industrial, not craft organization among the unorganized...
...The Red Banner By Gerald Massey PL/A/G out he red banner...
...For various reasons, slow progress was made and apparently our labor committle dropped out of the picture...
...True hearts would leap up were all hell in our path...
...A year ago last spring, the labor committee of the Socialist Party took the lead in a proper attempt to make the right kind of union and bring back the good days of the furriers' organization...
...ing the files and archives of ths unions and the party in their hands, they are of course free t» publish garbled copies of letters and other documents, so as ts create the impreasion that the ohV cials of the labor movement were guilty of grave misconduct...
...Socialist workers had already found 4,332 faulty ano fraudulent signatures at the ime the recall fight was dropped, out of the total of some 46,000 appended to the recall petitions...
...When the check-up started, Fortney II...
...Later the Central Committee adopted a report generally approving what the right wing had done...
...It is, fortunately, true that the A. F. of L. unions generally have shown an encouraging readiness and capacity to meet the opportunity given them just when their plight seemed most serious...
...rvho stirreth to stay us, Shall fall, as of old, in a Red Sea of wrath...
...I believe as much as any Socialist in the value of one strong, clean union of furriers, preferably affiliated with the A. F. of L. For that I should work...
...but they expected and got Socialist Party approval on the accomplished act first expressed in The New Leader, at least tacitly, before I started my own investigation or expressed my own condemnation of these tactics...
...Ghosts, gnomes, sylphs, and water sprites had signed up, according to the Milwaukee Leader...
...The fact that our party, especially in New York City, reacts so much more quickly to fear of Communism than to other more important stimuli is disquieting...
...Labor will And that it has a headache the day after...
...It might even set up a kind of labor court...
...Every practical cor siderat;on makes it important under the NRA that there should oe a unified labor movement bjilt out of wha...
...Dual untitle) can only be justified as against existing unions which by inaction, bureaucratic tyranny, over-emphasis on craft divisions or incipient Fascism give honest and aggressive workers no alternative...
...It should suggest out of experience the best tactics...
...The chief justification that I have heard is that the left wing is Communist controlled, and against Communism almost anything goes...
...Nevertheless, it provides a technique and machinery that labor can use and has already begun to use to go forward in orderly fashion...
...When I left New York early in July, I had seen the first draft of a report on the furriers' situation which at leaat condemned the appeal to an injunction...
...Well, look a', some things that have happened here and abroad...
...The most serious sign it this unhealthy attitude was labor leaders' renunciation of the right to strike and that with no good safeguards at all...
...They destroy our selfrespect and our real weight in the minds of the workers...
...He asserted that the names were being checked up only for the purpose of intimidating signers...
...Stark, self-avowed candidate against Mayor Hoan in the event of a recall election and the leading spirit in the recall movement, objected to the complete verification of the petitions...
...The industry in New York has been peculiarly cursed with the racketeering that has featured American capitalism...
...They did not consult the Socialist Party...
...Hitler's final arrest of certain labor leaders was perhaps a gesture of contempt more than of fear, since the labor movement had before the arrests virtually capitulated to the Nazis Yet only a short while ago Germany labor was more strongly militant in defense of the workers than most of our own unions have been and it could si.y that it had won for the workers in pre-Nazi Germany concessions which in America have been handed them as part of the administration's astute policy for trying to stabilize capitalism by enlightened concessions before it collapses in catastrophe...
...The use of the injunction against a rival union, however it may be disguised, is a more subtle form of the same evil...
...But as evidence of fraud accumulated in the court testi ony, the "Recall Council" headed by Stark decided that the ,'ig was up and asked dismissal of the recall petitions...
...the good will of the NRA or enlightened employers, but of the workers...
...It is this: Despite the sincerity and success with which the A. F. of I., unions are now fighting outright company unions, there is an appreciable danger that some of the regular unions may become little better than company unions in relation to the more powerful industrialists and the government itself...
...This organization to be effective must not depend primarily r.r...
...Yet it offered amazingly little resistance to Fascism of the Hitler brand...
...The A F ot L. should push the campaign President Green has begun to clean up some conditions within its own constituent members...
...This is not to deny that the lefts used outrageous intimidation...
...And to this we have added a solemn warning, that if we do not go forward we shall almost inevitably go backward to Fascism...
...During my absence, this was changed to approval...
...we have and utilizing existing machinery...
Vol. 16 • September 1933 • No. 11
