The Threat to the Labor Movement/Section 23
S. P. Bureaucrats and the S. P. Press.
THE "Committee for Preservation of Trade Unions," whose first act was to attempt to split the forces of labor supporting Sacco and Vanzetti, is an organization of delegates mostly from unions in which the officialdom is controlled by the Daily Forward.
Abraham I. Shiplacoff, chairman of the committee, is part of the Forward machine in the International Pocketbook Workers' Union. The Hebrew Trades Council is controlled by the Forward and it is the center of the newly-formed body. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers officialdom is represented by Beckerman, manager of the New York Joint Board.
The New Leader, official organ of the socialist, party, is trying with might and main to become the official organ in English of the reactionary drive. In its issue for December 28 it had no less than eight news stories and articles directed against the left wing and the Communists. It accompanies this truckling to the right wing of trade union officialdom with a front page appeal for funds.
The national executive committee of the socialist party, meeting in New York last week, officially assured the needle trades officialdom of its support. Its resolution on the subject, published in the New Leader, after making it plain that the N. E. C. will not oppose the present officialdom, or allow socialist party members to do so in the name of the party, goes on to state:
We rejoice that the members of the needle trade unions have united in a campaign to save the unions from the influence that has brought them to the brink of ruin. To the extent that socialist party members can be of service in this work we pledge their willing co-operation. …
That the real policy of the socialist party is in conflict with its professed neutrality can be seen by a comparison of the above with the following statement which is made in the first part of the N. E. C. resolution:
The socialist party has always been opposed to any capturing of the trade unions by political parties and TO ANY ATTEMPTS TO DIRECT AND CONTROL THE AFFAIRS OF TRADE UNIONS BY OUTSIDE PARTIES. (Emphasis mine.)
One statement negates the other. The position of the socialist party officialdom amounts to this:
No struggle in the unions against any party except the Communist party—the only revolutionary working class party in the United States.
That this is its actual policy is to be discerned by the fact that its official organ chronicles approvingly denunciations of the Communists and left wing made to meetings under right wing control by such well-known Tammany Hall revolutionists as Matthew Woll, Hugh Frayne, New York organizer for the A. F. of L., and Joseph D. Ryan, president of Mayor Walker's labor club, the Central Trades and Labor Council of New York City.
The program of the "Committee for Preservation of the Trade Unions," dominated by the Jewish Daily Forward and supported by the New Leader, is too long to quote in full, but one or two extracts will give a clear idea of the objective of this body. Point 5 reads:
To make a survey of the "innocents' club" and camouflaged organizations formed by the Communists or the Communist Party thru which they have received funds ostensibly for the protection of the foreign-born, the Negroes, the Filipinos, for release of political prisoners, for the protection of civil rights, etc., all of which are intended to further the destructive work of American Communism.
As in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, the various non-partisan mass movements mentioned cannot be stripped of Commuinst workers and sympathizers without either crippling or wrecking them. It is apparent that the socialist party leaders are quite willing to wreck these movements, all of them of vital importance to the labor movement as a whole, to get a crack at the Communists.
All of the movements mentioned are non-partisan movements in which workers and liberal middle-class elements take part. The Communists may be and generally are the most active section, but that they control them mechanically or can work in them for any other purpose than stimulating them, achieving immediate gains for the whole working class and thereby profiting as a revolutionary party from the generally improved militancy of the masses, is an idea that could originate only in a diseased brain.
It is true, however, just because of the active part taken by Communist workers, that most of these movements will die if the Communists are driven out or will become moribund and powerless, so empty of working-class vigor that the capitalists will have nothing to fear from them.